


Our highs and lows

by platinumnib



Category: Nightwish, Within Temptation (Band)
Genre: Angst, Drug Use, F/F, Overdosing, Self-Destruction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-22
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-09-26 08:56:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9878126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/platinumnib/pseuds/platinumnib
Summary: Drugs will do awful things to you, therefore, to me.





	

I walked over to the kitchen, careful not to step on Sharon’s head and dropped the grocery bags on the countertop. Then I came to crouch next to my girlfriend and the small pool of drool she had made on the ground. There was nothing close to dignified about her. Her hair was stuck to her skin with sweat, her clothes didn’t even cover half her body and she absolutely reeked of alcohol.

“You’re high again, Sharon.” It wasn’t a question anymore.

For the last three months, every one of my visits had found her dead drunk at best and chock full of pills at worst. Today, because someone in heaven hated me, it was both.

Sharon answered with a feeble incoherence and an awkward stare, as if she were looking through me.

“You idiot,” I sighed. I felt like I had to remind her.

“I… I tried, Tari, I promise I-”

“No you didn’t,” I cut her short.

Of course she hadn’t, but it came as no surprise; Sharon loved the stuff too much to even think about quitting. Tucking her hair behind her ear, I probed her irises, trying to understand the madness in them.

“How can you say you love me when you do this kind of thing to me?”

Sharon just giggled mindlessly and I realized she probably couldn’t even understand me.

Nonetheless, I decided she wouldn’t spend yet another night gurgling her puke. I pushed some empty bottles aside and lifted her to her feet. My head under her arm, I limped my way to the bathroom and started taking both our clothes off. Sharon let me sit her on a stool - at that point, she couldn’t really do anything about it - and pull her tee-shirt over her head and off. Her lower body wasn’t a problem, she only wore a pair of skimpy panties.

I took longer to remove my own dress trousers and the white blouse befitting of a proper working woman. I felt so out of place, neat and clean in Sharon’s pigpen of a flat, all in all an accurate projection of her life: a sad, chaotic mess full of pills and booze without ever a hint of anything productive. Her fridge waited for me to be replenished, her bills to be paid, her clothes to be washed, her bed to be made and herself to be washed, fed, put to sleep and everything else. It was a wonder how I never got tired of wasting my days with that fruitless routine. It had to be true love or gross stupidity on my part.

Once the dirty clothes were in the laundry basket, I pulled her up again, this time leading her to the bathtub and gently helping her get inside before sitting behind her. It took me a half hour to soap and wash every single spot of skin to get rid of the smell of her binge drinking. I could take care of the house later. For now, I just turned off the water, got Sharon out of the tub, and wrapped her in a towel, dabbing her dry. As little as I wanted to, I couldn’t help but feel how much slimmer she was than just two weeks before. Full breasts and taut stomach and the toned legs that used to get me hot and bothered with the slightest glimpse had suffered as much as her brain from crystal meth.

At first, she had paid for it, then stripped at a club to pay for it (God bless Amsterdam), and then she had become too weak even to hold onto the dance pole. I had thought it a good thing Sharon no longer degraded herself to gather enough money for drugs, until she had turned to alcohol and Desoxyn instead. It’s still meth, more or less, just legal and in pills, and even more expensive, but it wasn’t like she needed to buy it or anything. I use it to keep my depression under control, Sharon stole my prescriptions; what can I say, we are a pair of unfortunate souls with too many issues to be with anyone else. Were; we were.

I had tried a detox for her already; a failed detox. And Sharon had threatened to open her veins if anyone tried to put her back in it, so the best thing to do was just leave her be.

To anyone, it was a lost cause, but I was always a fighter and I loved that junkie too much to give up on her. So I kept taking care of her because she couldn’t take care of herself. If only Sharon could get rid of her nasty habits, I made more than enough money so we could be a happy couple, with a cat and framed pictures on the nightstand and tulips in the living room. Sharon didn’t even need to work. She could take care of the house, kiss me goodbye in the morning, have sex when I came back if we felt like it, just wake me up with a cup of coffee and a smile. Surely, that wasn’t much to ask for?

The thought alone brought tears into my eyes that I fought back. I knew we would never get to be that happy.

“Come on, baby, let me get you to bed.”

I did, as fast as I could stumble with her weight hanging off my shoulders, and once she was in her pyjamas and I had pulled some clothes on, too, we huddled together under the sheets.

“Feeling better?”

Sharon nodded at me with a half-hearted smile.

“Why did you go that way, Sharon? Why didn’t you just ask me for help?”

“You’re the only good thing I ever found in my life, everything else is shit. I shouldn’t make you fix it for me.”

“You have to, that’s what I’m with you for. You remember how we were? I used to make you forget everything bad.”

As I hugged her tightly, no longer suppressing the urge to cry, I dropped a flurry of kisses all over Sharon’s face, trying to show her someone still cared.

“I can do it again,” I whispered, more as a supplication than anything.

“I want to die.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“I fucked up bad. You should die when you fuck up like me.”

“You’re really an idiot.”

“I love you.”

“Not if you want to die. I love you. Even like this.”

I kissed her again as my hand slid up her leg, but she turned away decidedly.

“I’m sorry, I don’t want to.”

There was only so much a woman could take before her body shut down.

It didn’t come as a shock when I came into the bedroom to an eerie silence and with the feeling of something awfully wrong, and so I didn’t cry right away.

Sharon had decided she wouldn’t keep fading away like the last flickering flame of a candle. She had decided to go out like a bonfire in the best meth high of her life. Understandable, but sad and stupid nonetheless. At the moment, I wondered where she had gotten the money for so much drugs, before I found the credit card on the nightstand to my bank account from which (as I learnt the next morning) eleven hundred euros had been withdrawn. Next to it were a few shaky words scribbled onto a piece of paper. I didn’t read them. Nothing she’d written with drugs shooting through her brain could matter to me.

She somehow looked a lot more self-respecting than she had ever done alive. The way her body was laid out askew on the bed, black hair splayed out on the white pillow, you could almost think she was sleeping.

When I went over to sit on the edge of the bed and Sharon’s face came into sight, I saw the small trickle of blood from her nose that hadn’t gone past her upper lip. That was usual when she snorted. Several times, I had wiped that blood with cotton balls, begging her to stop killing herself, to stop, to just stop doing what she was doing for the good lord’s fucking sake, and the answer was either incomprehensible or there was none because she was out like a light.

Worse than the blood, her eyes were the hardest part to stomach. They were still open, staring into nothing, but I didn’t dare to close them. They gave off a blood-curdling impression that wouldn’t go away; they made Sharon look like she was about to talk to me.

“Sharon, my love?” I whispered, just to make sure.

An irrational need, I know, but nothing had ever been rational between us. I leant down and kissed her temple. 

Then, I cried in silence.


End file.
